You remember Brett Petersel. He's the self-promoting Silicon Alley tech-meetup organizer who opened widened himself to public ridicule by posting a Facebook note offering $25 to anyone who'd set him up on a date. Maybe you felt bad for him. Don't. So far the Lodwickesque exhibitionism is paying off. Petersel says his Facebook inbox is jammed full and yes, gay-hating dating site eHarmony gave him a free membership. But then came Petersel's really bad idea.

You've heard the horror stories about how Facebook's Beacon ads can ruin your Christmas. Even though Overstock.com — the online retailer whose use of Beacon caused most of the uproar — has turned Beacon off, there's no telling who Zuckerberg might sucker into installing the ads next. Take action now. Use Facebook's new privacy options to turn it off. Here's the simple four-click process.

Deepak Chopra, the author of "Golf For Enlightenment: Seven Lessons for the Game of Life," is a werewolf. (This means that we're presuming this is the real Deepak on the Facebook.) This also means that part of Dr. Chopra's day is spent fighting zombies and vampires and also biting his colleagues on Facebook and that he has working his way through the ranks of Creeper Werewolf, Rabid Werewolf, Werewolf Howler, Fire Werewolf, Cyber Werewolf. Savage Werewolf, Werewolf God.

In the wake of its Beacon fiasco, Facebook has launched a new blogger appeasement campaign — starting with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. His early Christmas gift? Facebook notifications now carry the entire text of messages sent via the social network. Arrington says this will have a "big impact." Yes, in the sense that it might get him to shut up about Facebook's privacy violations. [TechCrunch]

"I'll give that kid a fucking disability he can write home about if he keeps sending these code amendments to everyone" was the name of the Facebook group that University of Michigan Student Assembly prez Zack Yost created out of frustration with the frequent amendments proposed by Rep. Tim Hull. Tim has Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism that is often not really worth writing home about. "Yost's accomplishments as president include helping organize a rally in Lansing for increased higher education funding, developing an intern program to get more freshmen involved in student government and co-founding the Michigan Action Party ... But his legacy—fairly or unfairly—will likely be defined by the Facebook group," the Michigan Daily somberly intones.

An extraordinary public slap, rarely seen in the genteel world of magazine publisher Time Inc.: Fortune appears to have momentarily taken executive editor Josh Quittner's Techland blog away from him and handed it to rival tech writer David Kirkpatrick. Quittner's recent blog rant about Facebook's Beacon was wrongheaded enough, but entirely undeserving of this humiliation — republishing, duplicatively, a Fortune.com column by Kirkpatrick in Quittner's blog. Kirkpatrick, left, declared that Quittner, right, had been "silenced" on the Facebook issue. He went on to tear apart, at length, Quittner's argument. All the more shaming, because Kirkpatrick is — how to put this gently? — a laughingstock among his colleagues.

For a site some have declared dead, Facebook appears awfully lively. Compete.com reports a 20 percent increase in visitors to the site in the month of November. [Compete]

Can't a girl publicly humiliate her boyfriend by dumping him via her Facebook status message anymore without getting harrassed by a horde of social news readers? Nope. New York videoblogger Sandra Soroka tried to get away with it. The image above got over 1,600 votes on Digg. Somewhere along the way, somebody decided to exact revenge on poor Sandra, deleting all her photos on Flickr and replacing them with this one. And it's absolutely grotesque. Click, only if you dare.

I remember, distinctly, when former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner's love affair with Facebook began this spring. He couldn't stop talking about it, and I could hardly avoid hearing about it, since my office was next door to his. With all the zeal of a late convert, Quittner evangelized Facebook for most of this year — and now, feeling betrayed by Facebook's Beacon ads, he has attacked them with all the betrayed fury of a new apostate. Facebook is dead — to him, at any rate. Quittner's fickle rage perfectly captures the Silicon Valley hype cycle, and the press's complicity in it. Having built up Facebook, Quittner and his fellow reporters must, inevitably tear it down. But in this latest episode, it's Facebook's critics, not Facebook, who have jumped the shark.

Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the fiasco over Beacon, Facebook's controversial advertising system which reports users' activities across the Web to their friends. It turns out that, all these years later, he still values the trust of Facebook users. Of course, he has to remind us that trust is Facebook's highest regard every time he oversteps that trust. Maybe someone should remind the youthful CEO of his own views before he introduces a new feature which breaks that trust.

Maybe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has so far declined to talk to Robert Scoble — real, fake, or otherwise — and other bloggers for a simple reason. He knows the vast majority of Facebook users, still mostly high school and college kids, don't know and don't care about Facebook Beacon. That's what the above poll indicates. It's not the only evidence.

Stanford professor BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy extraordinare Dave McClure put on a class this fall for Stanford students interested in building their own Facebook apps. To the likely detriment of all involved, the class turned out to be a rousing success.

Mark Zuckerberg in his own words:

Startup investor Peter Thiel warns CNBC's Maria Bartiromo that the current economic situation is dire. Inflation, economic bubble, deflation, blah, blah, blah. But unsurprisingly, the former PayPal CEO turned venture capitalist sees one bright spot: Facebook, the social network where, uncoincidentally, he's a board member. According to Thiel, "it's the one part [of the economy] where there is no bubble at all." Sure, Peter, as if we really needed the disclaimer you add: "Of course, I'm biased." Not even the well-trained Maria "Money Honey" Bartiromo could keep a straight face at that.

Add this to the garbage in my Facebook news feed: I logged in this morning to find a "sponsored poll" about the Beacon advertising program. The poll didn't say who sponsored it, but I suspect it was Facebook itself. Freaked out by the reaction to Beacon ads, which report purchases and other actions taken on other websites to your Facebook friends, Facebook is trying to find its way through the fiasco. (Ryann from Facebook customer support writes to say, "Polls can be purchased by third parties, and we cannot give away any information on who purchased the poll. I apologize for any inconvenience that may cause.")

An anonymous reader writes:

Facebook widget makers RockYou and Slide account for two of the top three fastest-growing Web brands in the U.K., according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The third? Facebook. RockYou, the maker of MegaWall YouCan'tGetEnoughOfThisWallFunWallSuperWall, grew 2,100 percent from October 2006 to October 2007. In the same period, Slide, responsible for sheep-throwing app SuperPoke, grew 649 percent. Facebook itself grew 1,650 percent. Here's the chart.

Rumor has it Flixster is for sale and it wants $150 million. Not going to happen if the company doesn't clean up its Facebook act — or app, rather A tipster sent in this screenshot from his Facebook News Feed. It's a "story" from his Flixster app, and the glands it portrays put it in clear violaltion of Facebook's platform application guidelines. Be warned, what follows is a rare explicit depiction of the female chest.

Facebook tracks user activity on sites affiliated with its Beacon advertising program, even when those users have opted-out of the program and logged off Facebook. So say security researchers at Computer Associates, who offers the following screenshots for proof.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is suing to have unflattering documents unearthed by Harvard-themed magazine 02138—including "Mr. Zuckerberg's handwritten application for admission to Harvard and an excerpt from an online journal he kept as a student that contains biting comments about himself and others" to be stricken from the Internet. This is the same dude who made billions from a website that allows you to let everyone in your friend network know when you are peeing. [NYT]